Reflecting on his father’s history-making “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door” confrontation with Alabama Governor George Wallace in 1963, John Katzenbach recalled how his family referenced the incident in years to come.

“I can’t tell you how many jokes there were when any of us happened to walk through a schoolhouse door,” said Mr. Katzenbach. His father Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, who died at the age of 90 on May 8 at his home at the Stonebridge community in Skillman, made political history when he faced down Governor Wallace on the steps of the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa to allow African American students to register.

But the younger Mr. Katzenbach and his three siblings knew their father was a hero. “All joking aside, we were very proud of it,” he said of his father’s famous showdown with Governor Wallace. “He had an extraordinary life and we’re all very proud of his accomplishments.”

At the time of the confrontation with Governor Wallace, Mr. Katzenbach was U.S. Deputy Attorney General, second in command to Robert Kennedy. His participation in the civil rights movement helped shape key legislation. He was a central player in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, serving as attorney general under President Johnson. He was Under Secretary of State from 1966 to 1969.

Before and after his years in Washington, Mr. Katzenbach called Princeton home.

“My father grew up, basically, in Princeton,” said his son, who is a novelist. “He went to Princeton Country Day School before Exeter, and returned to go to Princeton University. It was always the place he considered home. It was not merely his connection with the University, which was a powerful one, though he was not a big ‘P-rade’ kind of guy.

“It was more about his deep, abiding affection for the college. He loved New Jersey, and he felt this great tie, not only through his father, who was New Jersey state attorney general, but also his mother, who had quite a career of her own and was ahead of her time. Everything was always in a New Jersey context. He was very proud of his connection to the state and with the town.”

Nicholas Katzenbach was born in Philadelphia and raised in Trenton. His mother, Marie Hilson Katzenbach, was the first female president of the New Jersey State Board of Education. The Marie H. Katzenbach School for the Deaf in Ewing is named for her. Mr. Katzenbach was a Rhodes scholar, a law professor at Yale, Rutgers, and the University of Chicago, and a hero in World War II who spent more than two years as a prisoner of war in Italian and German POW camps.

Mr. Katzenbach left government service to work for IBM in 1969, where he was general counsel during the long antitrust case filed by the Department of Justice seeking the breakup of IBM. The case was finally dropped in 1982. His book, Some of It Was Fun: Working with RFK and LBJ, was published by W.W. Norton in 2008.

As a 12-year-old, John Katzenbach questioned his father about the famous confrontation with George Wallace. “I remember saying to my father, ‘Why didn’t you just reach over and grab him and push him out of the way?’ He said, ‘What you can’t see in all of the pictures is that there were about four big guys standing there with their hands on their guns.’”

While living in Princeton, Mr. Katzenbach had a limited involvement in local politics, his son said. “The extent of his involvement would have been in battling any leash laws if they came up,” he said, joking about his father’s affection for dogs. “I know he was very fond of Barbara Sigmund, and sometimes she called on him for things. But I don’t think he was actually engaged in local politics that I’m aware of.”

According to Sheldon Sturges, one of the founders of Princeton Future, Mr. Katzenbach did take an interest in some issues related to the town, and voted last December in favor of the creation of a Special Interest District [SID].

“Nick told me that he read ‘every word’ of our monthly agenda packages,” Mr. Sturges wrote in an email. “He led the ‘Committee of Nine’ process of Princeton Future that resulted in a consensus in 2003 for the Arts Council to move forward with its expansion. He understood that the residents of Princeton needed more financial support from his alma mater.”

Mr. Katzenbach and his wife Lydia, who survives him along with his four children, returned to Princeton after he retired from IBM. Before settling at Stonebridge, they lived in homes on Province Line Road, Library Place, and the Great Road, his son said.

“Princeton meant so much to him, not just as a University, but as a town,” the younger Mr. Katzenbach said. “He always said he liked it because it was a place where people could spell Katzenbach. It was a place that really gave him the greatest sense of comfort in a sense of being home.”